Corrugated cardboard is commonly used in the manufacture of shipping cartons with a wide variety of uses. In the manufacture of corrugated cartons, it is customary to determine the compression strength of the corrugated carton by edge crush testing of precision cut samples that are typically of square or rectangular dimensions. The square or rectangular samples are designed to be subjected to several different tests, including an edgewise compression test that should be performed precisely parallel to a direction of internal flutes of the samples or precisely normal to a flute direction. To be able to produce reproducible test results on similarly constructed corrugated samples, it is necessary that the square or rectangular samples be uniformly and precisely cut so that two of the sample edges are precisely parallel to the flutes, and the other two sample edges are precisely normal to the flutes.
The samples may be cut by hand, such as with a razor, knife, or saw, or may be formed with a die. However, such methods are unreliable since the cut, and the precision of the cut, varies with the manual skill of the cutter. If a resulting cut is not square (e.g., the edges are not parallel or the cut edge is beveled), it is difficult to conduct a reliable crush test.
Some corrugated sample cutters provide more precise cuts than the aforementioned methods. Such cutters may include a base plate and a pair of cutting blades that are slidably mounted to the base plate with a slide block and rail system for cutting movement in a direction parallel to a first guide rail. Second guide rails are spaced from each other by a predetermined distance to allow a sample to be simultaneously cut by the pair of cutting blades. After cutting the sample a first time, the sample may include first and second cut edges, and the sample may be rotated ninety degrees and positioned between the pair of second guide rails. The pair of cutting blades may be moved along a cutting path a second time to complete the cutting of the sample into a precise square.
However, such corrugated sample cutters only include a parallel, fixed-width pair of cutting blades that cannot be adjusted. Thus, such sample cutters can only form corrugated samples with the parallel, fixed widths. Furthermore, tools are required to remove the blades of such corrugated sample cutters, which is time consuming and cumbersome.